Monday, February 27, 2012

Cleaning up the #MediaWiki namespace II

Only those messages that need to be customised should exist locally. When many messages have only been localised like on the Assamese Wikipedia, the challenge is to copy the messages to translatewiki.net and once the LocalisationUpdate has done "its thing", remove the local messages.

Robin's tool does provide the necessary information about the messages that exist only on the local Wiki. For somebody who knows Assamese, the first step is a matter of copying the existing messages to translatewiki and verifying if they are correct. This improves support for the Assamese language on every Wiki.

The job of deleting the local messages that are the same is something best left to a bot. It is best practice to remove them because it prevents problems down the line. A bot should perform this task on every WMF wiki.

Running Robin's tool is a task that should be run on any MediaWiki wiki. When this task has been performed on many wikis, there will be enough data to indicate the messages that typically have a local override. This could be the next step in optimising your local MediaWiki setup.
Thanks,
GerardM